Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I’ve got my phone book and toilet seat all warmed up,” I said with a tiny smile. “Muchas gracias, Javier.”

  He raised a hand to me as I walked to the Fairlane. “Watch your back, Wilder.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I drove straight through to Los Angeles, nine hours and change, getting me to the FBI field office at 8 AM, just as their day was starting.

  At the front desk, I flashed my badge and asked for the agent in charge of the Mackelroy case.

  “I’m sorry, but Agent Capra isn’t available,” said the secretary, who was blond and sleek as any wannabe movie star.

  “This is important,” I said. “It’s about a quadruple homicide.”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes around the lobby looking for help. The somber suits filing past us didn’t pay their secretary and one skinny dark-haired woman jittery from too much caffeine any mind.

  “Is Mr. Mackelroy directly involved?” she finally asked. I had a brief moral dilemma about whether or not to lie my ass off and then told her yes.

  “I suppose,” the secretary said, “you can go ask Agent Capra directly and maybe he’ll let you speak with Mackelroy, but this in no way constitutes a promise, all right?”

  “Sure, fine, whatever,” I said. “Which way is Capra?”

  “Fraud Division,” said the secretary. She pointed a desultory red fingertip over her shoulder at the elevators beyond the metal detectors.

  I got scrutinized, patted, and wanded by a security guard with the federally requisite surly attitude in place, and when I had the temerity to ask “Which way is the Fraud room?” he grunted like I was terminally stupid.

  “Elevator,” he muttered.

  “You’re so helpful I may go into shock,” I said with a wide smile, and stepped into the elevator with a crop of tall, white, well-dressed agents, not one of whom was wearing jeans, combat boots, or a rumpled David Bowie T-shirt.

  The Fraud Division was quiet, and more somber than I’d expected an FBI office to be. Everyone had nicely arranged cubicles and indirect lighting. The ASAC had a big glassed-in office. Occasionally a phone rang or a besuited agent got up and walked to the fax machine/photocopier combo that gleamed next to a watercooler and a plate of pastries, but otherwise everyone kept their heads down. It was all very corporate and sterile, and it made my skin crawl up and down my spine, much like I imagined the eponymous village from Village of the Damned would.

  “Help you?” said a voice from one side, and I faced a very handsome suit in blue pinstripes, a blue tie, and shoulders that nicely set off a mocha-caramel face and a smile that would have blinded anyone within ten feet.

  “I’m looking for Agent Capra,” I said, returning the smile.

  The suit whistled. “You sure? You look way too alive and engaged with the human race to be in need of Capra. Wait, don’t tell me.” He held up a finger. “Undercover. Busting some hard-core DVD pirates?”

  “I’m not with the bureau,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. “I take it Capra’s not popular among the rank and file?”

  “Let me put it this way,” said the suit. “Capra’s ideal fantasy is ten minutes alone in a room with Kenneth Lay and a lead pipe. Guy’s sort of a freak. I’m Mike, by the way. Special Agent Mike Hardy.”

  “Luna Wilder, from Nocturne City,” I said, shaking the proffered hand. “I actually need to see about speaking to one of Capra’s prisoners.”

  “I pity the inside trader who brought you down on them,” said Agent Hardy. “If you’re not an agent, you should be. I could turn you loose at a neo-Nazi meeting and those boys would be giving you their mama’s cookie recipes.”

  “Um, thanks?”

  “I used to work organized crime,” said Hardy. “Put in for a transfer. Must have been out of my goddamn mind. Anyway, Capra won’t let you see any of his suspects in custody. He screeches even if you bring a warrant.”

  “How do you know I don’t have one?” I asked. Hardy strode over to the coffee-and-pastry array, and I followed. He offered me a cheese Danish and I took it, plus a jelly donut.

  “Trust me,” said Hardy. “Cops like you never come with warrants. Just hopes and dreams.”

  “I need to talk to Joshua Mackelroy,” I said. “It’s important.”

  Hardy swallowed a swig of coffee and made a face like it was drain cleaner. “How important?”

  “Lives-at-stake important.”

  He whistled. “Serious, no doubt. And you did drive all the way down here. But Capra won’t let you talk to his prisoner. The marshals are coming to take Mackelroy over to Pelican Bay later this morning. He’s got an arraignment for the conspiracy charges attached to the O’Halloran securities fraud next week.”

  I kicked the watercooler. Hardy jumped. “Gods-damn it!” I shouted by way of illustration.

  “Whoa, whoa,” said Hardy. “What’s this about, anyway?”

  “Joshua Mackelroy is directly linked to four people who’ve been murdered in my city and a fifth who almost was,” I said, shivering despite my best efforts to appear badass and unflappable. “He has information that I can’t get any other way.”

  Hardy put his hands on my shoulders. “You okay? You seem awful involved with Mackelroy.”

  I pushed his hands away, grabbed my collar, and pulled it aside to expose the four silvery scars where my neck and my shoulder met. “He did this to me. Hell yes, I’m involved.”

  “Everything Hexed and holy,” Hardy whispered, examining my bite scars. Four teeth instead of two. The thing that marked me as Serpent Eye whether I wanted it or not.

  “You said it,” I muttered.

  “Look,” said Hardy, “Capra went to get coffee and that always takes him at least thirty minutes, especially if he stops to kiss the ASAC’s ass. I’ll let you in with Mackelroy if you’re gone in twenty.”

  I goggled at him. “You could lose your job.”

  “Yeah, but Capra’s an asshole and you’re a damsel in distress.” Hardy winked at me. “Make it fast, Detective Wilder.”

  He led me down a gray corridor beyond the cubicles to the holding cells, and I didn’t bother to correct him before he opened Joshua’s cell door.

  Joshua had his head tipped back against the cement wall, eyes closed. A three-day rash of stubble ranged over his crooked jaw, and his dishwater-blond hair was longer and stringier than when I’d last seen him. He looked thin, and hungry. Dangerous as a captured carnivore.

  He inhaled deeply, his nostrils flaring until they turned almost white, and then his head snapped up and his eyes fixated on me. “You need a bath, Luna.”

  “You need to time-travel to 1985 and give Bret Michaels his hair back. But let’s not get hung up on details.”

  He snorted, one side of his mouth twitching upward. Joshua wasn’t what you’d call handsome, if you were sober and old enough to know better, but not many fifteen-year-old girls are, especially the ones who are trying to say Fuck you to their parents as loudly as possible.

  “Knew you’d eventually come back to me,” he said. “Has that pretty-boy Redback used you up and spit you out yet? Funny how you have no problem being a whore to someone who can sweet-talk you. Discriminating against me because I’m not a fucking hypocrite. You’re something else, Luna.”

  I sat down on the single chair in the cell, which was bolted to the floor across from the cot where Joshua . . . lounged, was the best word for what he was doing. “You seem to be under the impression that you’re dominant and I’m afraid of you,” I said. “Hate to break it to you, Mackelroy, but you haven’t scared me for a long, long time. Also, I’m not a member of your pack, so save the posturing for some high school freshman who’ll give a rat’s ass.”

  “Then how come you’re sweating, Luna?” He smirked and folded his arms behind his head. “Is it that I get you hot?”

  He brought it on himself, he really did. I got up, very slowly, and walked over to Joshua until I was mere inches away. His scent roiled my stomach but I stared him down, never blinki
ng, letting my anger ride roughshod over anything else I might be feeling.

  “If you open your filthy mouth about me again,” I whispered, feeling the pull on my were side from his dominate, “I will force you down on the ground to lick my feet like the crying bitch you are. And after that, I’ll kick your goddamn teeth in.”

  Joshua growled and started for me, and I pulled out my sidearm, pressing the barrel of the Glock between his eyes.

  “Make no mistake,” I said, still hissing. “There’s many a day when my deepest, fondest desire has been to put a bullet in your brain, Joshua. Someone like you, I’d shed no tears over killing.” He was absolutely still, teeth drawn back over his lips. I snarled in return, showing my fangs. “But you know something? I realized after I met you again, after you tried to take me back into the pack and failed, that I don’t need this gun to deal with you.”

  Part of me had fully intended to put a slug in Joshua if he tried anything, and that part of me screamed in disappointment when I holstered the weapon. But the were was riding me now, and my voice wasn’t entirely my own when I growled, “Weak.”

  I locked eyes with Joshua and I pushed his will back, and down. A hot iron wand slipped through my midsection, where the phase spread from. This wasn’t like dominating another Insoli, or a pack that I happened to encounter. This was my maker, my rightful mate, the man who had turned me from Luna Wilder, screwup human, to Luna Wilder, werewolf.

  Joshua’s blood was my blood. Fighting him was like fighting my own darker impulses.

  Still, I pushed him away and he howled. “No! Stop!”

  “Yes,” I gritted, or maybe I merely growled, I don’t really know. “You are weak. You are mine.”

  “Bitch . . . ,” Joshua gasped. “You can’t . . .”

  He was so strong, and the pain was incredible when I tried to subsume his will, but in that instant I felt him slip, just a little, no more than an inch.

  “Joshua,” I hissed. “You do not tell me what to do.”

  And like a crack in a dam, I felt his dominate break. Joshua’s will splintered and disappeared under the force of my rage and he slumped back to the mattress, sweat running down either side of his face like misplaced tears.

  “Stop it!” he whined, and if he’d had a tail he would have stuck it between his legs. “Gods damn it, haven’t you done enough to me?”

  “You did start it,” I reminded him, sitting back down.

  Joshua’s thin chest rose and fell rapidly under his jumpsuit, and I could hear the faintest thud-thud of his heartbeat. “Why’d you come back here?” he demanded plaintively. “I washed my hands of you when you ran out on me the first time. Why are you torturing me?”

  “Jesus on a bike,” I said, borrowing an expression from Bryson, “were you always this whiny?” I crossed my ankles primly. “Joshua, I know Serpent Eyes only pass on their change through the bite. I know that you passed pack magick to me whether I like it or not.”

  “So?” he muttered.

  “Sooo,” I trilled, leaning forward. “A vanful of psychopaths who seem to be targeting the first families of Nocturne’s weres dragged me out into the woods and tried to kill me. I started thinking, why would they do that? And then it hit me: your progenitor must’ve had a link back to the granddaddy of all Serpent Eyes!”

  “Well, yeah,” said Joshua. “Why do you think it went so bad for me when you split?”

  I paused, a little shocked he’d given the information up so easily. I had expected that pseudo-clever caginess Joshua was an expert at. Maybe I’d kicked him a little harder with my dominate than I thought.

  “Thanks, jerk,” I said. “Now that I know to look out for crazies obsessed with bloodlines, I can rest easier.”

  I stood up and made for the door to signal Agent Hardy that I was ready to go.

  “Oh,” said Joshua with a soft exhalation that may have been a spiteful laugh, “I don’t think they’ll be bothering you again.”

  Feeling ten degrees colder all over my exposed skin, I turned back to him. “What the Hex does that mean?”

  He lay back on his cot, and damn it all if he didn’t look as indolent and in control again as the leader of a pack, beset by his harem and without a care in the world.

  “Joshua,” I said again, pushing on him with the dominate. “What are you talking about?”

  “You really think you were the only piece of ass I gave the bite to, Wilder?” he said with a grin. “My, my. That’s awfully narrow-minded of you, Miss I’ve-Got-It-All-Figured-Out.”

  “You’re lying,” I said instantly, to beat back what my brain recognized as the truth. “Weres have mates. They give the bite once and that’s it.”

  “I’m a Serpent Eye,” said Joshua. “What makes you think I give a fuck about any pack law but my own?”

  Cold, and with all the deadly force I could muster into my voice, I asked, “Who is she?”

  “You’re the great detective, Wilder,” said Joshua, lips peeling back into a smile that showed his fangs. “You figure it out.”

  He squealed when I grabbed him off the cot and held his head over the steel toilet in the corner of the cell. “You have five seconds and then I’m giving you a shampoo, you piece of crap.”

  Joshua laughed, his bony shoulders quivering. “Oh, don’t bad-cop me, Luna. You don’t have it in you.”

  I bounced his head once off the rim of the toilet, and he yelled. “Don’t pretend like you know me, Joshua,” I warned. Crouching so that I was at his level, my fingers knotted in the collar of his jumpsuit, I met his eyes. “Who is she?”

  I’d dominated pack weres before, at a cursory level so that they wouldn’t tear my throat out, but this was different. I felt like I had put my hand inside Joshua’s head and scraped it clean. I caught his pain and scented his fear.

  It was horrible, violation in the extreme, and I knew exactly why weres like Joshua enjoyed it so much.

  “Who?” I demanded. Joshua began to tremble, and then the stink of piss filled the cell. I saw the stain on his jumpsuit and my already jumpy stomach bucked against my rib cage. “All things Hexed and holy . . .” I made a quick few steps away from Joshua as he shook uncontrollably.

  “C-carla,” he whispered. “Carla Runyon. Back in Nocturne.”

  I buzzed for Hardy without another word, more desperate to be out of that cell than I’d ever been, for anything.

  Hardy followed me all the way to the lobby, which was how far I paced before I realized he was still with me. “The thing with Mackelroy didn’t go well?”

  “He’s a daemon spawn,” I spat. “He deserves to have his testicles chewed off by ferrets.”

  “Bastard, no lie,” said Hardy. “He got a good deal to turn state’s against O’Halloran. Posthumously and all . . . guess there’s not much to lose.”

  I could feel tears starting so I smiled at Hardy and said, “I have to go back to Nocturne City now.”

  “Okay,” he said, kindly averting his eyes so he didn’t see the sheen in mine. “Hey, if you’re ever down in LA give me a call. I’d love to take you out, try and lure you into the bureau.”

  He passed me his card and I took it, and walked back to the Fairlane with the midmorning sun dazzling my eyes. I felt scarred, and shaken, but most of all, at my core, I felt nothing. Joshua’s hold on me was broken. Yet somewhere in Nocturne there was another girl, someone who wasn’t lucky enough to be able to confront her devil. My kidnappers had been well organized and well informed, and now it was a race between me, them, and the ticking clock to see who found the poor girl first.

  At the Twenty-fourth I ducked Shelley by using the prisoner entrance and sat at Bryson’s desk, spinning his chair until I got dizzy, and then getting coffee, and then finally throwing the stir-stick across the room. Where the Hex was the man?

  His phone shrilled just as I’d decided to leave him a sticky note and drive out to find the Wendigo. I wasn’t bleeding anymore, and thanks to Joshua I was also spoiling for a fight.

&nbs
p; “Bryson’s desk.”

  “Why, Luna Wilder. I thought I’d never hear your dulcet voice again,” said Bart Kronen.

  “Dr. Kronen, my favorite medical examiner,” I said. “The same. What’s up?”

  “I’m trying to reach David,” he said. “Something unusual with the victims in his four homicides that I needed to discuss.”

  “You know,” I said in my brightest tone, reaching for a pen. “Bryson and I are working the case side by side . . . me being were and all. Sort of a consulting deal.”

  “Ah,” said Bart.

  “So I could come by and look at your findings.” Gods, this was so wrong. I would be so fired. Forget fired, I’d probably end up at Los Altos with my former homicide captain and a passel of angry mercenaries who had worked for Seamus O’Halloran.

  “I’m working my usual shift at the morgue,” said Bart. “I’ll look forward to your visit.”

  “Thanks, I . . .” Sweet orchid perfume blanketed my nose just before Matilda Morgan came to my shoulder, and I managed to slam the phone down in the nick of time. “Ma’am.”

  “Officer Wilder. To what do I owe the pleasure?

  I plastered a smile on. “Just waiting on Detective Bryson, ma’am.”

  Her eyebrow arched delicately. “I see. Officer, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the city’s ability to prosecute your case and all cases attached to it goes down exponentially every time you—the victim—interfere with the investigation?”

  “You don’t, ma’am,” I agreed. “But really, I just came here to share some information with David. So he might clear the other cases a little faster.”

  “Your altruism never ceases to astound me,” said Morgan in a voice so dry you could set it on fire. “However, the next time I catch you in my precinct sticking your nose into an investigation you might directly compromise, I’ll have your badge, Luna. You are not the only competent law officer in this city.” She jerked her chin at Bryson, who had appeared from the hall carrying a bag from Big Darn Heroes, the sub shop one block over. “Give Bryson your information and get out.”